Busting Out

by Tej Nagaraja

Mission Rejected:
U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq
by Peter Laufer
2006, Chelsea Green Publishing Company;
212 pages, $14, paperback

Here are some troops we should all support. Peter Laufer’s Mission Rejected features individual portraits of the most admirable U.S. military resister-activists, as well as a picture of the broader scene and climate of the ranks from which they emerge. In their own voices, we learn how and why they enlisted, their experiences during their time in the military, and how and why they busted out.

The refusers’ profiles offer a diverse and nuanced mosaic of why a young person joins the all-volunteer U.S. forces of today, avoiding simplistic generalizations of a free personal choice on the one hand of mass coercive poverty conscription on the other.  We see a muddled spectrum that encompasses racist trigger-happiness and national chauvinism; the sexiness of individual glory and collective service envisioned by kids weaned on G.I. Joe and Top Gun; the urge to break out of a dead-end hometown to the only apparent opportunity for travel and adventure; the fear of post-teenage independent responsibility and the military option as the next regime of personal structure; and of course, the promise of otherwise-unlikely education and job prospects, the decision “to choose Uncle Sam over ronald McDonald.”

Pain of War

Many of the soldiers in this book have been to Iraq and back.  They have been participants to and witnesses of the massacres, murders, and torture - the shredding of Iraq’s social fabric.  Some bacame alienated and disgusted over time, while others point to a specific traumatic event (“lighting up” a Toyota packed with kids at a roadblock checkpoint, humiliating a woman in a routine home raid, massacring a wedding party) that lucidly flags their personal detour.

In describing the brutality and suffering faced by Iraqis, the soldiers are unanimously resolute in naming their mission a war of aggression, and their actions war crimes and crimes against humanity.  By my count, the three words most used to describe the U.S. war and occupation are the same that were listed by the Fort Hood Three in their 1966 statement refusing to go to Vietnam: illegal, immoral, and unjust.  Challenging both mainstream racism and leftist PR sensibilities to emphasize the American dead, in recounting their worst moral pains, Laufer’s troops overwhelmingly focus on the hundredfold more Iraqis killed.

With U.S. barbarism at Abu Ghraib and Haditha, antiwar activists are quick (and correct) to call out the scapegoating of poor/working-class privates and specialists at the bottom of the command structure while Rumsfeld, the generals, etc., are left off the hook.  Laufer’s interviewees report incidents of top-downward criminal orders and discipline for those unwilling to go along, but also of soldiers exercising their own agency - kicking decapitated heads like soccer balls or breaking bottles over Iraqis heads as a sport.

Soldiers’ disillusionment is not always a progressive emotion, or even a sympathetic one toward the “hajjis” and “sand jockeys” at their daily mercy, or to the girlfriends and wives to whom the men return home, who face increased violence and abuse. Misplaced resentment is summarized at its ugliest in Clifton Hicks’ letter home: “We’d like to spit in the President’s face… but we can’t do that… So instead we take it out on (most likely) innocent Iraqis.”

Shame to Pride

At the heart of each story is the transformation of a soldier, as they find and practice the courage to refuse to deploy to Iraq for the first time, or refuse to go again.  Some apply for conscientious objector status; many go AWOL and are branded deserters, living underground in the United States or fleeing to Canada, where they are collectively campaigning to win asylum as political refugees.

Others still in the United States face sentences of jail, hard labor, and prison. Deserter Ryan Johnson notes that soldiers who shoot up mosques face no punishment, yet “[t]hey’l put someone in jail for five years for not wanting to kill somebody.” Steven Casey echoes, “I would rather go to jail and not kill anyone than be over there and have a chance to kill an innocent person again.”

Many of these resisters have organized and joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), and work closely with parallel organizations like Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families for Peace. As with Vietnam Veterans Against the War in the sixties, political education within these organizations is central. Johnson’s attorney, Jeffrey House, discusses the rapid politicization of new war resisters and solidarity activists, explaining that before “If you never though about anything… you’re now being asked, ‘What’s the status of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, of the West Bank, as opposed to the American occupation of Iraq?’”

In coping with post-traumatic stress disorder and trying ot transition to a different kind of life, peer-to-peer relationships among veterans within and between organizations and generations are essential to the antiwar veterans movement.  Many have lost relationships with pro-war family and friends for becoming “commie antiwar peace-freak faggots,” but have found new kinship and support in this work by speaking out to the public about the lies and crimes of the government and reaching fellow soldiers and potential recruits about the lies and manipulation they have been fed.

Though Laufer covers many topics through interviews and research, one point notably missing was the social contradictions within the military’s ranks, particularly the experience of women, non-white, and queer soldiers.  This is especially important given the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent report about hate and fascist groups’ campaign to swell the military’s ranks. Tod Ensigns’s American Military Today and Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg’s 10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military help to fill in the blanks about homophobia, racism, and sexism in military life.  The growth and progress of this movement will hopefully inspire at least as much book-worthy history as the Vietnam era did.

Joshua Key, self-described former “American terrorist,” concludes “I love my people… But I do not like the American government.” Charlie Anderson response to support-the-trooops “thank yous” with shame: “People were saying, ‘I’m proud of what you did over there.’ And I’m saying, ‘God! I’m not. Why are you telling me you’re proud of me? You don’t even know what I did.”  Through personal and political struggle, the soldiers here find a new road from shame to pride and ultimately toward a humanist solidarity with their former “enemies” in Iraq.